...to you, until we meet again (and I'm sure we will). Just a quick note to say this Friday will be my last day at GameSpot.

I hate long goodbyes, so this will be quick. Believe it or not, GameSpot has been paying my bills for well over eight years now, first as a freelancer, then an intern, then a freelancer again, then finally an editor, at which point I packed my bags and headed from North Carolina out to the left coast to work in the office fulltime. I'm learning that leaving a job after so many years feels more like a breakup than a simple professional transition, but it's time for a break all the same.

The hardest part will be leaving all my coworkers behind, whom I admire and will miss each in their own way. You wouldn't believe the number of talented and inspiring people I've been lucky enough to cross paths with--and in some cases, truly befriend--in my years here. Pretty humbling, really. Keep on keepin' on, y'all.

As has become the fashion, I've set up a blog if you want to keep up with my exploits:

http://verbocracy.blogspot.com/

I've had a blast busting out content for you guys and gals all these years. Catch you on the flipside.

Because I haven't posted anything on here in far too long, I thought I'd talk about the gaming I did during the two-week span I was chilling (figuratively) in North Carolina over the break. There may be some spoilers, you've been warned, etc.

Mass Effect: I was ready for this game to be my favorite of the year, and although it's pretty flawed in a few aspects, it was probably the most enjoyable gaming experience I had in 2007. For every frame rate hitch or mind-numbing uncharted world I ran into, there were half a dozen brilliant dialogue sequences, dynamic combat scenarios, and satisfying plot revelations. I thought the last two hours were the best of the game, bringing the loose plot threads together quickly and sensibly amidst some really impressive action set pieces.

The game's narrative scope is so great, I sat one night for a couple of hours just reading through all of the codex entries to absorb the universe the writers fleshed out with such a stunning combination of breadth and specificity (check out the lengthy descriptions of the Turians' duty-bound militarized society). I'd love to see the Mass Effect property extended to other media, and it seems especially ripe for serialization in the Battlestar or Babylon 5 vein.

I hope EA can help Bioware shore up the technical areas in which ME is lacking, because while the game's lows are a little irksome, the highs are phenomenal.

Call of Duty 4: The multiplayer, anyway (I haven't finished the single-player because playing through it on 'hardened' is becoming a bit of a grind. Stupid infinite respawns!). I feel like all I need to say here is that I obsessively played COD4 online without the promise of any online-related Xbox Live achievements to strive for whatsoever. They dole out the imaginative perks and tasty new weapons at just the perfect rate to keep you hooked, and even without that carrot-on-a-stick thing going on, the core shooting model feels so perfect I stopped playing Halo 3 for it (and Halo 3 ain't no slouch).

If you want to level up quickly, play headquarters. Thanks for the power-leveling, Rich.

Switchball: The first few levels of this were surprisingly fun and addictive; it felt like a combination of Marble Madness and Mousetrap (or any Rube Goldberg-like contraption). I feel like this is the sort of game I'd want to make if I ever tried to make a game. I also feel like it's a game my mom could enjoy, although I never got her to sit down and try it. (My parents actually have a 360, believe it or not.)

Resident Evil 4 Wii: Holy crap does this game ever hold up! Even three years after its original release, RE4 on the Wii offered the most concentrated fun-per-minute rate of any game I played over the break. My cousin and I plowed through the storyline in two marathon sittings, just so we could open up the Mercenaries and other bonus modes to start trying for the elite weapons. You really can't say enough about how great RE4 is... it's probably in my top five (maybe three) games of all time. On one hand, I don't know how RE5 can live up to this. But on the other, if it does, wow.

Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: I was a vociferous complainer about Twilight Princess' similarity to Ocarina, and especially its staunch adherence to the old Zelda formula. You know, explore dungeon-find new item-fight boss-repeat. How many times can you really play the same fire temple and collect the same boomerang? So I feel a little hypocritcal having so much fun with Phantom Hourglass, which has been utterly delightful so far. I like that it doesn't take itself too seriously, with characters like Linebeck and the traveler adding some needed mirth. The controls are also totally refreshing and have worked beautifully so far. The map-annotation features is surprisingly useful. And probably more than anything else, I love its personality. The cel shading looks surprisingly good on the DS, and there are some great little touches like the characteristic poof of smoke when enemies die, or the way Link tamps down the earth with his foot when he fills in a hole with his shovel. Basically, I'm just glad the Wind Waker's cartoony visual aesthetic didn't die out. I for one thought Twilight Princess' return to realistic form was pretty well unnecessary.

I bought multiple copies of this game as Christmas gifts, and my girlfriend is now almost as far in it as I am.

--

Anyway, that's all the gaming I had time for during a surprisingly busy holiday break. What games did you play, and what did you think of them?

When the hell did Gameloft become a console game developer, and a good one? Between the way-more-than-competent Prince of Persia remake on Xbox Live Arcade, and now this amazing-looking Brothers in Arms game on the DS, those guys have really come out fighting.

Bear in mind Gameloft was previously known for making cell phone games.

I don't enjoy watching the console makers hit hard times, or take any pleasure when they err. I was saddened by the GameCube's relatively poor third-party support and lack of games (something I hope Nintendo can rectify this generation). I feel bad for Microsoft and its continued failure to gain a significant foothold in the Japanese market (because I think the Xbox 360 is a great system). And as much as the media (including this site) has flung criticism at Sony over its frequent missteps in designing, producing, launching, and promoting the PlayStation 3, I'd rather see Sony as an object of admiration than one of derision.

Granted, some notable figures at the company have made themselves easy targets at times over the last year, but there's no joy for me in pointing out their mistakes. I'd much prefer they get out of this rut of sporadic, middling releases and questionable public relations and turn the PS3 into the heavyweight it ought to be. Healthy, fruitful competition is good for the whole industry, right?

What I do enjoy is seeing a company like Sony pull itself out of the kind of slump it's been in for quite a while now. And that's exactly what it seems to be doing after its recent banner week at the Game Developers Conference. Admittedly, Home has a lot left to prove--but there's a lot of potential there, and they had to do something in the online space. The newly announced PlayStation Edge initiative doesn't directly affect end users, but it should trickle down to them in the form of more and better third-party games. And in the most uplifting hearts-and-minds move I've seen any company make in a while, the 1.6 firmware update will let PS3 owners help cure some nasty diseases with a Cell-specific version of the Folding@Home client. That's pretty awesome.

But from the hardcore gamer's perspective (read: yours and mine), what Sony really needed was something truly new, something you just can't get from Microsoft or Nintendo (who are themselves peddling a lot of unique features these days). For that, there's LittleBigPlanet, easily the most visually and conceptually impressive thing I've seen on the PS3 since the Sony hype machine started cranking back at E3 2005. Yeah, okay, I can't get over the whimsical look, the amazing lighting and motion blur effects, and the extensive physics modeling. I think it's one of the prettiest games of the HD era so far--go watch the new HD trailer and try to disagree. So there's a big plus on the aesthetic front already.

Finished Resident Evil 4 over the weekend.

Yes, finally.

Yes, I'm that behind.

Holy shazbot.

I mean, I knew it was a good game. I'd already played enough of it by early December to help ratify its selection as Game of the Year, but having now seen the entirety... like... words fail me. One of the best games ever. It just gets consistently better as you go, and I can't believe a game that good is also that long, without any noticeable filler. I'm still reeling.

Not like I'm saying anything that hasn't been said before, but what a bold move for them to strip out all the GARBAGE that was weighing the series down in order to reinvent it almost from the ground up. No more ink ribbons, absurdly limited ammo, or horrible camera angles. In their place you get the most satisfying core shooting mechanic since Quake's rocket launcher. And then after you finish the story, they take that mechanic and distill it to its essence -- I spent hours with the Mercenaries mode, and it's been years since I played an action game that made me care about getting high scores.

Resident Evil, the property, has gone from being utterly sub-relevant to being once again one of my most-anticipated franchises. Nice job Capcom, ya done good.

Next up: finishing God of War. Um, yeah, sue me.

...wallet out! Guitar Hero should finally be in stores everywhere today--although Ryan and I have been playing it for a week courtesy of Best Buy--so like, go buy it and stuff. Buy two. Buy copies for your whole family. If they make enough money on this one, maybe they can afford to license "Sweet Child o' Mine" next time around.

Seriously, this is the most fun (and the most purely fun experience) I've had with a video game in months...years...ever? If you enjoy the rock, you have no excuse for not playing this game. Thank you Harmonix and RedOctane for making me grin like an idiot while prancing around to any of a couple dozen songs in this game.

\m/

This entry should serve as a nice counterpoint to my last one, which was written what must have been years ago.

I went into 2005 feeling like I'd be spending the next 12 months playing nothing but World of Warcraft (if they can ever stabilize their servers, that is). This feeling owed in part to the absurdly addictive quality of Blizzard's first MMO, but also equally to the impression I had that there just aren't a lot of big games coming out this year. That impression is mistaken, thankfully. I was reminded by our Most Anticipated 2005 feature that there's a stack of what looks to be quality games on the horizon. More impressive, many of them don't even have a 2, 3, or 4 on the end of their names.

I don't know how it ended up that seemingly every hugely anticipated sequel to every revered franchise was released over the span of just a few months late last year, but I can say that it made things interesting for we who cover the games industry professionally. Not only were the big games last year more numerous than usual; many of them also grew to larger-than-life proportions, to the point that one of those games' release dates was more than just a trip to the store, it was an event. Halo 2, San Andreas, Half-Life 2--these games were catching the attention of even the mass media, turning in impressive sales records and setting Internet message boards aflame. Last year's big games were all great, but they were arguably a little underwhelming in a "been there, done that" sort of way. You know?

How encouraging it is that on our list of the games to watch out for in 2005, so many of them aren't sequels, offshoots, or rehashes. Sure, plenty--okay, all--of them borrow basic gameplay concepts from other successful titles in recent years. Any game does that. But a lot of developers will put out games in the coming year that aren't part of an established, proven franchise. There's a whole slew of games that present entirely new worlds and characters while putting their own spin on proven gameplay formulae. Check out God of War, for instance. Ancient Greece is a woefully underutilized setting for an action game. I played a demo of it last week, and those guys have nicely shoehorned some amazingly entertaining, hyperkinetic action into the Greek milieu (and the graphics are pushing the PS2 hard, to boot).

I'm also really looking forward to Pandemic's wacky action game Destroy All Humans!, primarily because the kitschy '50s alien-invasion style is really appealing to me, and I've heard good things about the game so far. Why does every game that resembles Grand Theft Auto have to be a gritty portrayal of urban crime? The "sandbox" concept is proven; credit to Pandemic for slapping a new coat of paint on it. And how about Wanda and the Colossus? I suspect this statement will sadly carry little import with a lot of you, but any game from the team that made ICO is going to be something worth looking at.

It's pointless for me to prattle on about why these games look so great when you can just go read the feature. Plenty of other games on the list are new properties--F.E.A.R., BioShock, Jade Empire--and even some of the sequels, like Oddworld Stranger's Wrath, represent bold directions for their respective series. Of course, I can't speak for the quality of any of these games, since they're not done yet. But as much as I like Gordon Freeman and the Master Chief, I'm looking forward to getting to know some new faces this year.

The following scenario has occurred more than once over the last several weeks of my game-reviewing career:

I'm playing whatever game I'm reviewing at the moment. A coworker comes up to my desk and asks, "Oh, is this [sequel name]? How is it?" I can only reply, "Did you like the last one? This one sure is the same thing."

A lot of the sequels I've played extensively this fourth quarter have felt remarkably like their forebears. And I'm not just commenting on general gameplay mechanics--I mean actual HUD elements, models, or sounds being reused. It seems like the pressure is so heavy on publishers to produce sequels to their top-grossing games that creativity and originality are being stifled in favor of getting another product with the same brand out the door. Everything from Viewtiful Joe 2 to Jak 3 to Metroid Prime 2 has given me this distinct impression, and those are just my most recent reviews.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying these games are anything like bad. Au contraire, friends--I loved all of them. But in this age of unfettered hype, it's a little hard not to expect more out of a follow-up to your favorite game than new levels and a few extra weapons. On the PC, these games would be expansion packs, retailing for half price. On consoles, somehow, they pass as full sequels.

This kind of overt similarity is at least understandable in cases like Viewtiful Joe 2 or Jak 3 (not to mention its spiritual sibling, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal), where the new game is hitting shelves a scant year after the last game. But even games that have been in development a lot longer (and are, admittedly, higher-profile) are doing the same thing. San Andreas, Metal Gear Solid 3, even the vaunted Halo 2 are all nearly the same games, on a fundamental mechanical level, as their predecessors. Again, great games, but the feeling of deja vu is unshakeable. Are developers wisely sticking to tried-and-true formulae or just clinging too tightly to established convention?

Amusingly enough, Doom 3 was chastised by so many people for its supposedly rehashed gameplay--but it's been my favorite game of the year so far. And there are budget-priced critics' darlings like Katamari Damacy and Alien Hominid winning hearts and minds, if not bringing in consumer dollars en masse. With so many huge sequels coming out this year--GTA, Halo, Metroid, Metal Gear, Doom, Half-Life--2005 and its dearth of big-name games is going to feel positively empty.

At least there's always Zelda.

Yeah, so I didn't actually have dinner with Reggie. Bite me.

What I did have last week was an opportunity to fiddle around with the hotly anticipated and almost-buyable Nintendo DS (which, I'm told, stands for "dual screen"). Let me establish that I went into Nintendo's Seattle press thingy with pointed skepticism about this strange new device's chances in the retail wilderness. Their strategy is certainly baffling; competing with their own product, one which utterly owns the marketplace, does not necessarily seem a sensible course of action to me. Yes, they say DS isn't going to go up against the GBA, but let's be realistic here: People are only going to carry around and actively buy games for one, two handhelds at most. One look at the release list for the GBA in the coming months will tell you where Nintendo is throwing most of its resources.

I will grant that the PSP was poised to swoop down upon Big N's precious marketshare like a buzzard to carrion before they started all this dual-screen, touch-sensitive, microphone-having posturing. So I guess they had to do something besides allow Sony to steamroll over their tidy little nearly-100-percent piece of the portable market. As usual, where Sony is going the conventional, sell-to-everybody route ("It's got sexy design! It plays mp3s! You can watch movies!"), Nintendo is attempting to innovate. Will anybody care about the touch screen? The microphone? Yeah, the wi-fi is cool, but laptops have wi-fi. Let's see you do something cool with all this stuff. Before I went up to Seattle, I was fully prepared to see a product that was destined to follow in the Virtual Boy's inauspicious footsteps.

Then I played it. I think I kinda loved it.

Oh, it's a qualified love, don't get me wrong. The factors that will make or break the DS's success are myriad, and I'm not about to throw my unfettered support behind a device that is so far from the gaming norm. Will it get consistent third-party support? Will the wireless work as well as they say? Will it come in designer colors?! These and many, many other questions need answering before we know for sure if the DS is going to be a longstanding contender in the handheld market. But here are some things I do know right this second:

The DS has that Nintendo polish. I don't know what kind of industrial designers and product focus groups and endless hardware revisions they've got going on, but there's something about Nintendo products that screams quality at me. When you fold it open it's got a nice solid click, like a cell phone. The touch screen seems strangely resistant to fingerprints. The wireless works without any coddling on your part. It's absurdly easy to grab this thing for the first time and use all of its features right then and there. Even joining a game of Metroid was absolutely a pick-up-and-play affair.

At least Nintendo is exploiting the features. You know how the N64 controller came out and everybody looked at it and went "Huh?" Remember how all those people went on to play Mario 64 and said "Oh, I get it." almost immediately? Seems like Nintendo stuff is always like that--they make something weird, then they make something else using the weird thing in order to explain it to you. For me, it was Yoshi's Touch & Go that sold me--I picked up the stylus, I drew some clouds to cushion Mario's diapered bottom, and I felt the corners of my mouth drawing upward in that involuntary grin Nintendo's so good at coaxing out of me.

PictoChat is awesome. I sat at a table for a good 30 minutes investigating the features of this neat little built-in application that lets you send text and drawings back and forth. Actually, what I really did was marvel at the exchange of truly impressive, rapid-fire artwork that was happening between a couple of other journalist types who were hanging around. The DS is gonna be the ultimate note-passing device in grade schools if it catches on.

Developers are catching on. Admittedly, some of the third-party stuff I saw at the event felt a little shoveled onto the system, but then, some of the other stuff was wild. Check out Feel The Magic: XY/XX, which has you rubbing some dude's belly on the touch screen to make him barf up goldfish. Another one of the minigames in there makes you blow on the screen (technically, on the microphone) to blow out some candles. Call it gimmicky, but I've never interacted with a game in quite that sort of way before.

It's $150. C'mon. You'd pay $150 just to have a portable copy of Mario 64. Admit it.

Anyway, I'm a whole lot more bullish about the DS now than I was before I got to play it. The hardware is solid and pretty darn cheap; I just hope they can come up with the software to keep it going. But then, with Mario Kart (!), Animal Crossing (!!), Advance Wars (!!!), and an all-new Mario game (!!!!) on the horizon, I don't think that will be much of a problem.

That PSP is something else. I think those Sony kids might finally be going somewhere with this one.

By now, I'm sure any number of post-TGS impressions stories have made it clear that the PSP is looking like a phenomenal system. I'll admit to bearing some skepticism going into the show about Sony's big bad handheld--it looked too big to me, and therefore too clunky; the control layout, with that weird pseudo-analog thumb… thing, seemed less than user-friendly; Sony's slightly draconian control over media distribution seems a tad restrictive (something I'm still not quite over). Then there's the price, which I can't believe will come in at anything less than $250. Sony surely has a lot invested in this portable system, but there are a lot of iffy factors standing between release and guaranteed success.

Five minutes with the PSP in my hands allayed almost all of my concerns. Here's what's good: The thing is absurdly sleek and chic. This is one of the slickest pieces of personal electronics I've ever laid my hands on. The size is just about perfect, the controls feel natural, the screen is phenomenal. Enough can't be said about that screen--it's bright, the colors are rich, and it's real big. I could easily imagine watching and enjoying a full-length movie on this thing, and the widescreen aspect is perfectly suited for games, too.

The bad: Sony's current lineup for the system is weak. That's no kind of final judgement, since plenty can happen between now and the system's release, but among the PSP games available at TGS I saw no killer app, no one game that's guaranteed to bring the masses to this product. Then again, the fundamental appeal of the unit itself may be all that's necessary to sell the PSP, great titles or not. This thing does more than play games, after all.

Among the stuff that I played at TGS, Metal Gear Acid and Lumines were my personal standouts. As much as I was hoping for a new Solid Snake mission in the typical Metal Gear vein, Acid's tactical and slow-paced nature seems like a lot of fun so far--and I never thought I of all people would get into a card battling game. Lumines' puzzle mechanics are solid but not mindblowing, but it's the presentation, the sublime melding of visuals and music and pacing, that sold the experience for me (and what else would you expect from the creator of games like Rez). I'll definitely be checking these games out come launch time, but it feels like the PSP needs a lot more than what was on display to really win over the hardcore audience.

If you're wondering how the system actually feels to play, well, kinda like a Dual Shock. The big difference is the almost-analog control, which doesn't tilt like a stick but actually sits flush with the face of the PSP and slides back and forth. It seems to only detect a relatively small number of discrete directions, so it's not really true analog in the way a console controller is analog (although there's no such thing as truly analog control in games, but I digress). The shoulder buttons aren't particularly noteworthy from a functional standpoint, but I do really like the fact that they're transparent. I can't get over how attractive the PSP is--I just hope there are good carrying cases available at launch, because it would be a real shame to scratch it or bang it up.

Aside from the PSP blitz, my second Tokyo Game Show was pretty similar to my first. It's basically a smaller E3 with a more intense assault on the senses, and everything is in Japanese. If you've been to E3, you have a pretty good idea of what TGS looks like, but it's a little more low-rent than the show in LA. There's no springy, plush carpeting between booths--it's just bare cement floor. On the other hand, the Japanese still cling stridently to that age-old trade-show convention: the booth babe. TGS has a big vendor area where many of the companies displaying products can also peddle all sorts of game-related trinkets (Square Enix and Capcom, I'm looking in your direction). It's definitely obvious that where E3 is slowly maturing, with seemingly fewer girls and less free crap every year, TGS is very much targeted at the public, which absolutely clogs the place on the second and third days.

Here's one thing TGS has in abundance that E3 thankfully lacks: Guys with megaphones. C'mon dudes, give it a rest. Every 20 feet there's another employee of some company or other blaring something in your face through a bullhorn. Coupled with the booming sound systems all over the place, it can really wear down your nerves after three days.

One thing I found striking about TGS this year was the number of big games (MGS3, Resident Evil 4, Halo 2) that were on display in the exact same form we as game journalists have seen them in multiple times already. All of those games were playable at TGS, but all as demos we've already played at least a couple of times already at previous events. It's a little disappointing to come to an event as big as TGS and find the games you were most excited about are looking exactly like you saw them last time. Jeff mentioned that this points to the increasing importance of E3 as a worldwide showcase rather than just an American one, and it's true: Most big announcements and game debuts happen at E3 these days, while something like TGS is intended largely for the Japanese audience to get a look at the same games. 'Sides, that just left more room for us to cover some of the more obscure stuff.

Anyway, the show is barely 24 hours old at this point, so I'll try to cobble together some more coherent commentary soon. Meantime, check out these words (and movies) we cranked out over the last three days.